Zahlen, bitte! 350 questions for the ideal pen pal: beginnings of online dating
Nuclear fusion and dating by computer were highlights of the 1964 World's Fair: while nuclear fusion remained a dream, online dating is the norm today.
What many people take for granted today was uncharted territory 60 years ago: computer-aided dating. While resourceful engineers were initially still looking for pen pals, one visitor came up with the idea that more was possible with the computer search.
At the halfway point of the 1964 World's Fair in New York, 33 million visitors had visited the Expo and admired many highlights: The push-button telephone, the Ford Mustang and Belgian waffles are mentioned in the chronicles, along with nuclear fusion with its promise of inexhaustible energy. The most visited pavilion was that of the Vatican with Michelangelo's PietĂ and the first visit by a pope to the USA (he finally arrived at the end of the second half in October 1965).
(Image:Â CC0, Gary Lee Todd)
In the Parker Pen Company pavilion, the so-called Penettes were able to breathe a sigh of relief at half-time: they diligently handed out questionnaires to be ticked off, which were evaluated by a computer. The aim of the stationery manufacturer's campaign was to generate one million pen pals in order to bring peace and relaxation to the world.
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"Peace Through Understanding – Through Writing" was the name of the peace program, which was under the patronage of former US President Dwight "Ike" Eisenhower. It was one of several attempts to break up the frosty relations between East and West, but also between North and South America, following the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Eisenhower's philanthropic initiative was taken up by Parker Pen, the company that traditionally supplied the signature paraphernalia for US presidents, at least until it was bought up by British investors.
Peace questionnaires for pen pals
The company hired 25 women as "penettes" to hand out questionnaires at the Parker Pavilion at the 1964-65 World's Fair. In addition to their address, age, gender and details of their main interests, visitors to the pavilion could choose from a further 350 details at 65 desks, ranging from religion to art, cooking and sport. These numbers were fed into a computer which, after a tour of the exhibition, ideally found a correspondent to whom a few lines could be sent.
On August 11, 1965, the million mark was finally reached during the second half of the world exhibition. The 25-year-old basketball enthusiast Evelyn Groves was matched with a female basketball fan from SĂŁo Paulo, Brazil.
25-year-old accountant Lewis Altfest from New York also visited the Parker Pavilion. Inspired by the pen pal arrangement, he contacted his friend Robert Ross, who worked as a programmer at IBM. In 1965, the two of them developed the "Technical Automated Compatibility Testing" (TACT) program for the IBM 1400, a nerdy name for a program that was supposed to arrange dates among the residents of New York's Upper East Side for five dollars. The list of questions was greatly reduced to make the matching process fairly straightforward. From today's perspective, it sounds brutal how you had to state your dislikes: "1. Affected people. 2. birth control. 3. foreigners. 4. free love. 5. homosexuals. 6. interracial marriage".
(Image:Â Gobierno de los Estados Unidos)
Spoilt for choice when it came to wishes
Men had to tick how their date should be styled and specify the desired hair color. Women had other pictures to tick, namely a man at camp chopping wood, a painter in front of his relay and a guy lying under his car in the garage doing handicrafts. For the five dollars invested, TACT customers received five cards. They were blue if you were a woman and pink if you were a man getting your matches. The latter also contained the telephone number where the date could be reached, if entered. This was missing for women, as it was not considered proper for women to take the initiative for a date. Around 5000 New Yorkers took up the offer, which was "expanded" by Altfest and Ross, by making their way past doormen and copying the addresses from letterboxes (PDF).
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TACT was not the first computerized dating service. The Technical Automated Compatibility Testing was only the first to be designed purely commercially, in contrast to university-internal dating attempts by students and a show interlude: computer love had previously been initiated by Remington Rand's Universal Automatic Computer I (UNIVAC), which selected one couple from every 4,000 entries, who were then presented on the NBC show "People are Funny" from September 1956.
When this pairing was discontinued in 1957 without any results, it was considered a failure, but when one of the couples married in Hollywood in 1958 with the show host as best man, the newspapers were full of praise. The history of the dating service had already taken many twists and turns by then.
Back to TACT, the dating system with the slogan "Pick'em cuter by computer", to which the BBC devoted a report. This was because the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office became suspicious and a jury looked into whether this form of dating was lewd and attracted criminals. Altfest had begun hosting parties for singles living in the neighborhood alongside the computer service, which Cosmopolitan in turn reported on under the title "Modern Lifestyle of Singles". Eventually, Altfest and Ross lost interest in expanding TACT further.
TACT dating was actually quite useful for Altfest. He married a journalist who interviewed him when she wanted to uncover the whole dating scam with investigative research.
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